MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Order today at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Order today at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
By Mark Landler & David E. Sanger @ NYTimes.com, Sept. 23
[....] For Mr. Trump’s advisers, the biggest risk at the United Nations General Assembly this year is the reverse of what it was last year: not that he will be dangerously undiplomatic, but that he will be overly enthusiastic about engagement with wily adversaries.
Far from restraining Mr. Trump’s belligerent tendencies, his senior aides are engaged in a quiet effort to avoid a direct encounter with Iran’s leader that he would be unprepared to handle or concessions that they fear could undermine their effort to keep pressure on North Korea.
Either of those possibilities would rattle Mr. Trump’s aides, who are uniformly hawkish about Iran and North Korea, and favor squeezing those countries over talking to them [....]
“The president is prepared to bluster and threaten, but he also wants to achieve the deal of the century,” said Robert Malley, who helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal as an official in the Obama administration. [....]
Laying out a series of requirements for the Iranians is one thing; controlling the president’s conviction that he can outmaneuver any leader, or strike any deal, is another. A vivid example of these challenges has come in the tangled preparations for Mr. Trump to be the chairman of a meeting of the Security Council on Wednesday [.....]
By Jonathan Swan @ Axios.com, 25 mins. ago
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has verbally resigned to Chief of Staff John Kelly in anticipation of being fired by President Trump, according to a source with direct knowledge. Per a second source with direct knowledge: “He’s expecting to be fired,” so he plans to step down [....]
Lets face it. All male groups be it all male schools, sports teams, fraternities etc. tend to let the worse impulses of masculinity flourish. Not just among the most aggressive of the boys/men. Even those who wouldn't behave so sexually aggressively are pushed towards sexual aggression and if not actively involved at least tolerate and encourage their more aggressive brothers. This article is a bit of information about that basic reality as it manifests in elite prep schools.
The new rule was taped onto doorways around town: Officials were limiting what a groom-to-be could pay for a bride.The going rate was about $38,000, or five times the average annual salary in this village about a four-hour drive north of Beijing. Now, families were told to keep it below $2,900. Ask Liang, a pear farmer in Da’anliu. He has one daughter. When it comes time for her to marry, “I will ask whatever amount I want,” he said. “It’s not fair otherwise.” “It’s the market,” he said. “I’m allowed to charge what the market will bear for my pears. Why not my daughter?”
I read this and highly recommended it if you need some hope that wingers of all kinds can change and even grow to see reality. Not to mention the many other interesting things it touches on, like prison culture...
The real America is not in Norman Rockwell pictures, it's here in this one minute video ad. Nice looking family!
By Adam Goldman & Michael S. Schmidt @ NYTimes.com, Sept. 21, 3:30 pm
By Shane Savitsky @ Axios.com, Sept. 20 with graphics
While current headlines might make you think that geopolitics is going to hell in a handbasket, things right now are better than normal around the world — at least from the market's perspective — according to BlackRock's latest global risk update [....]
US will ‘do what it takes to protect vulnerable workers’ but frames slavery as a matter of trade competition not human rights
By Reuters via TheGuardian. com, Sept. 20
The United States said on Thursday it was boosting its fight against slave-made goods “to safeguard American jobs“, signaling that the Trump administration regards forced labor as a trade, rather than a human rights issue.
The new approach was revealed in the Department of Labor’s biennial list of goods that it “has reason to believe” are produced by child or forced labor, which became a crime to import in 2016 under a law introduced by Barack Obama.
“American workers cannot compete with producers abroad who use child labor or forced labor,” the US secretary of labor, Alexander Acostam said in a foreword to the list of 148 goods produced in 76 countries. If “a trading partner” engages in child or forced labor, “the US will do what it takes to protect vulnerable workers from exploitation, safeguard American jobs and create a fair playing field for countries that play by the rules”, he added. A Department of Labor spokeswoman said the report represented a key contribution to protecting vulnerable workers from exploitation worldwide [....]